IZZAT Ibrahim al-Duri, one of Saddam Hussein's top deputies and a man who eluded US capture despite a hefty bounty on his head, reportedly died quietly overnight at the age of 63. The notice of his death came not from the US military, but from a statement signed by the dissolved Baath Party command.

"The leader of the resistance died on Friday November 11 at 2:20 am," according to the statement signed by the Baath command.

There was no immediate confirmation of his death.

Duri was one of Saddam's most feared right-hand men and was said to be suffering from leukemia.

In November 2003 US authorities put a $US10million bounty on his head. In Iraq, only Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has a higher reward for his capture or killing.

Advertisement: A trusted aide of Saddam since the very beginnings of his rise to power, Ibrahim was a natural choice for the sensitive mission of leading an underground resistance network.

He was seen as the man who could potentially serve as a link between the Saddam regime and radical Al-Qaeda Islamic fighters.

As recently as October 5 of this year, he called for escalating the insurgency in a letter attributed to him and published by the London-based Arab newspaper Al-Qods Al-Arabi.

A survivor of successive purges, Duri was the among the last living Iraqi officials who took part with Saddam in the 1968 coup that brought his Baath party to power.

Early in the occupation the US military believed Duri was using Saddam's hidden cash to pay for attacks on US troops.

The prime mover behind the ousted regime's adoption of Islamist rhetoric through the 1990s, Ibrahim was a religious conservative who was regularly shown on state television praying at Baghdad's main mosques in Saddam's day.

Duri's trail went hot and cold over the first year and a half following the US-led April 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam. Then it went cold.

In December 2003, US troops launched a massive assault on the town of Hawijah, an insurgent stronghold west of the oil center of Kirkuk, on a tip that Duri was receiving a blood transfusion there. The hundreds of paratroopers came away empty-handed.

One month earlier US troops detained Ibrahim's daughter and one of his wives in a raid in Samarra, another rebel stronghold, and even used air strikes to destroy two of his homes near the town.

Duri was the King of Clubs in the US playing cards of former regime officials, and one of his daughters was briefly married to Saddam's son Uday.

Like Saddam and most of his inner circle, Duri was a native of the town of Tikrit, though he also has tribal connections through his daughter-in-law's family in the Mosul region further north, another insurgent stronghold.

In September 2004 US and Iraqi authorities claimed to have captured him after a shootout in Tikrit -- only to be forced to retract when the detained man turned out to be a relative.

Duri was given the honorary rank of lieutenant general and made deputy armed forces commander of the northern region during Saddam's regime even though he was not a soldier by training.

Kurdish officials say he maintained close ties with a network of former army officers, intelligence agents and loyalist militiamen after the US-led invasion.

Many Iraqis knew Duri by his nickname "The Iceman" because of his humble origins selling blocks of ice on the streets of Mosul.

In 1988, in the closing stages of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, he formed part of the special security team that oversaw the repression of an Iranian-backed Kurdish uprising through the use of chemical weapons.

Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, Duri was charged with eradicating Shiite Muslim rebels from the marshlands of southeastern Iraq.

Long before the United States made him a top figure on its most wanted list, Duri's record of brutality had brought him to the attention of both human rights watchdogs and the Iraqi opposition.

In 1998, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the Shiite pilgrimage city of Karbala. The following year he was nearly arrested in Vienna on war crimes charges, where he had been receiving medical treatment for leukemia.

US commanders have always said that Duri's age and state of health made him an unlikely underground guerrilla leader, but insist that he was the banker and brains, not a field operative.

Even if a lot of news feeds start to broadcast it, don't mean it is true. Considering the source(s). Until his body is exhumed and proven to be him by DNA work, I am not going to believe it. And if he is dead, due to his important position, surely the Iraqi leadership will realize his body must be inspected, regardless of the Islamic rules on immediate burial etc..

13
posted on 11/11/2005 6:36:43 PM PST
by Marine_Uncle
(Honor must be earned)

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